After the Experiment

Nick Houde is researcher who lives in Berlin and a co-founder of Substrate, a consultancy exploring the culture of outer space. Over the years he has conducted extensive research for Other Internet, Trust, co-matter, Serpentine Art Technologies, and various cultural institutions around the world. From 2016-2022 he was a lead researcher for the Technosphere project at HKW. He studied philosophy at the EGS.

For a time, DAOs and the broader Web3 movement scratched a pernicious itch that has plagued a generation beset with social, economic, and political institutions that no longer matched the very online and hyper-globalized world they were meant to manage. It proved to be a sandbox for experimenting with how groups of people might coordinate ownership, decision-making, and shared purpose using new organizational primitives that made possible the kinds of institutional infrastructure which the internet era has so far failed to produce.

In my own small corner of the culture world, where we had been building our own "utopian conspiracies" as artists, writers, and organizers, it felt invigorating to engage with over the past decade. People were building, rather than merely theorizing about new distribution models that could actually monetize creative work fairly or reimagine how collective works could be managed. New structures for how IP could be shared, how contributors could be compensated, how decisions could be made transparently by the people affected by them were de rigueur. What struck me most was that this was not the usual mode of cultural production where we research and create works "about" social change from a comfortable critical distance. People were actually constructing experiments for new ways of doing things together. Whatever else you thought about the space, that was a genuinely refreshing approach.

But then, as with so many domains before it, the experiments fell prey to the same power-law dynamics they were ostensibly designed to escape. The financialization of everything corroded the promise of governance from within. Token-weighted voting, which was meant to distribute agency, concentrated it instead. Squad wealth went from being an optimistic vision of collective prosperity to a secret cabal of anonymous whales pulling strings behind the scenes while the broader community performed participation in forums that had already been decided. And the cultural experiments that had initially felt so promising, NFTs chief among them, devolved into low-bar slop for people to speculate on rather than becoming anything meaningful contributing to the longer history of art or culture. What began as genuine social experiments in how people might organize differently became, in the end, just another set of financial instruments draped in community’s clothes.

Without a higher order goal, a sense of purpose, something galvanizing that could resist that pull, the organizational experiments inevitably collapsed into the very dynamics they sought to overcome. And frankly it’s a ubiquitous problem for all of our social, economic, and political systems today, not just a failing of web3. The movement clearly had the right instinct about the need for institutions that could replace the ones we’d inherited but most projects failed to articulate a purpose that was not easily subsumed into speculation and the same power laws that govern just about any other set of institutions left to the gravity of capital alone.

I say all this not to just bludgeon people with a post-mortem, but because I’d actually like to excavate this animating spirit for institutional change as something that was terribly correct and terribly needed for our moment and suggest the change in our own mental models that might be needed to realize this. For all its problems, web3 showed us that building another set of institutions and systems is possible technically, if only we can work out the meaning side.

Part of why this happened is that the movement never developed a sufficient respect for cultural activities and processes as being integral to the experiment itself. Culture, in the thick sense of unglamorous work of building shared practices, norms, and ways of making decisions together, was treated as peripheral to the real action of protocol design and tokenomics. The builders were, for the most part, engineers and financiers who understood coordination as an incentive problem to be solved technically, not as a cultural process that required cultivation over time. And the cultural practitioners who did participate were largely slotted into the role of content producers rather than recognized as people doing the foundational work of making collective life cohere. The sandbox and infrastructure were there and even quite well designed. But without treating shared cultural practices (more than just a GM) as the connective tissue of the whole endeavor, the experiment could only ever be partial and not the thing that would actually make these new institutional forms livable and durable.

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The heart of this problem is that we as a society have lost touch with what "culture" actually does for our human systems. The word culture, in most practical usage today, has become synonymous with the artifacts of the art and literary world; mostly objects, performances, books and things made by creative people who squarely operate within the legacy confines of exhibitions, museums, bookshops, and cinemas.

But there is another, older, and frankly more useful understanding of culture that comes from anthropology. In this register, culture is not a category of production but a mode of coordination. It is the accumulated set of practices, norms, rituals, and knowledge structures through which a group of people processes information and organizes collective action over time. It is, to borrow anthropologist Joseph Henrich's framing, the technology through which our species builds and maintains a "collective brain" capable of holding far more knowledge than any individual mind. What distinguishes human beings from other species, Henrich argues, is not that we are individually smarter but that we are collectively smarter because we have evolved to learn from each other across generations, and the technologies and institutions we build are products of cultural accumulation over deep time rather than individual genius. He argues that once a body of knowledge becomes sufficiently complex, cultural evolution favors what is really a "division of information" manifest through an increasingly intricate web of specialized knowledge held together by "cultural transmission institutions."

Culture in this sense is what thinker Chor Pharn calls metabolic. It is how societies digest complexity, transmit hard-won knowledge across generations, and bind strangers into cooperative arrangements that none of them could sustain alone. When it works, it is largely invisible because it is the medium through which everything else becomes possible.

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The DAO movement, for all its ambition, was poised to engage with culture at precisely this anthropological level. What made it compelling was not just the financial engineering but the underlying proposition that coordination between strangers could be formalized without inherited hierarchies. It was an experiment to show that governance, ownership, and shared purpose could be rebuilt from first principles using new organizational primitives. My own engagement with DAOs, both as an observer and as a researcher, was driven by this possibility.

In ethnographic research I conducted with Tara Merk and Laura Lotti as part of Other Internet we interviewed 38 DAO contributors across more than 50 DAOs in the Ethereum ecosystem and we found that this aspiration was deeply felt. Contributors overwhelmingly described joining DAOs for social and values-driven reasons: the conviviality of working alongside people they called "gigabrains," the chance to experiment with novel forms of organizing. Ultimately, the desire to contribute to something that aligned with their values rather than merely extracting a wage. Most of the people we spoke to explicitly stated that money was not their primary motivation. When we asked them to map their organizations against traditional institutional archetypes, they most strongly associated DAOs with mutualist organisations and cooperatives; bottom-up, member-owned structures oriented around goals beyond profit. In the contributors' imagination, DAOs were supposed to be radical new experiments for a new culture of working together.

This resonated with earlier work I had done with Arthur Röing Baer on the structural crisis facing unions, where we argued that the central challenge for labor organizing in the twenty-first century is one of scale and form. We thought that DAOs could be used as coordination mechanisms that aid the collective bargaining power of centralized or trade-based unions now that their leverage was radically diminished by decentralized multinational companies. This is because a strike at a single firm or locale becomes ineffective when production can simply be rerouted through an ever-shifting network of intermediaries, shell companies, and alternative supply chains. What unions had historically accomplished was to institutionalize collective leverage by parasitizing the organizational form of the firm, matching its scale, its legal structure, and its capacity to act as a coherent entity. The question we posed was whether scaling trust and commitment across workers who might never meet could be afforded through enforceable protocols for consensus and mutual obligation.

DAOs offered a live testing ground for the mechanisms we had been speculating about. And in some ways they delivered. But what our Other Internet workers' inquiry revealed was that the reality of DAO life fell devastatingly short of the mutualist vision once the sloganeering was cast aside. Contributors described their working conditions as unstable, undercompensated, and unpredictable. Many compared DAO work to a "next level internship." Token-based compensation tied people's livelihoods to speculative markets, and governance that was nominally decentralized was in practice often controlled by majority token holders, subsequently, reproducing exactly the shareholder dynamics the new organizational form claimed to curtail.

Perhaps most telling for the argument I am making here was the sheer volume of invisible coordination labor our research surfaced. Some contributors reported spending twelve hours a week in meetings simply to keep the organizational structure functional even when their time contribution was rarely recognized in the tokenomic models that were supposed to govern contribution and reward. And this is precisely the cultural work that makes institutions cohere: the slow, unglamorous, relational labor of building shared practices, resolving conflicts, transmitting norms, and sustaining mutual obligation over time.

There is an idea that scaling collective action requires enforceable mechanisms for coordinating commitment among people who cannot rely on social proximity or personal knowledge of one another — that trust, at scale, must be institutionalized rather than assumed. DAOs attempted to solve this computationally, through incentive design and smart contracts but what our ethnographic work made clear is that the trust problem is not merely a coordination puzzle to be engineered away but a cultural problem requiring the cultivation of meaning. The psychosocial security, financial predictability, and shared sense of purpose that would have been necessary for contributors to actually build durable practices of solidarity were nowhere to be found. When the only coordination mechanism is the token, everything eventually reduces to the token price. To be honest, the same could be said of most cultural systems today as they fall prey to the Goodhart's Law that is our current state of exocapitalism where price is almost entirely decoupled with facts on the ground.

What was missing, and what remains missing in much of how we think about digital organization, is the question of purpose. Not purpose in the startup pitch-deck sense of a mission statement stapled onto a business model, but purpose in the sense that anthropologists and sociologists mean it. The type of thing that turns a crowd into a body capable of acting together with a shared orientation that gives a group of people reason to coordinate in the first place. Not game-theoretical incentive structures but a higher goal.

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After all, what is governance when you haven't clearly stated the outcome you desire? There is a particular strain of political liberalism that has prevented us from thinking through this problem for decades, assuming that game-theoretical incentive design can supplant genuine cultural motivation and that the coordination of shared meaning is already handled so long as the mechanism design is elegant enough. It mistakes the scaffolding for the building. After all, aren't we more than bug-brained Pareto maximalists? The ethos of "just build" rings hollow when no one can articulate what we are building for, when the unstated assumption is that purpose is already figured out so long as you get rich.

If that assumption is wrong then the real unfinished work for web3 is not in refining tokenomics or governance frameworks but rather in building the practices, institutions, and norms adequate to a world where the technical capacity to organize has outstripped our collective sense of what to organize toward. And the same goes for the organizational landscape outside of web3. It’s a chance to remake culture as the metabolic process through which groups of people make sense of their world together and coordinate their actions within it.

Web3 showed us, for all its failures, that building new institutional forms is technically possible. The infrastructure can be stood up and new primitives can be designed. What it could not provide however is the shared sense of meaning that makes people want to show up for each other over time, that transforms a governance mechanism into a living set of institutions guided by purpose. That work is cultural in the deepest sense, and it remains the work we have yet to seriously consider even in domains well beyond web3 as the institutions and world order we have relied on for decades just keeps crumbling. The question now is whether we can finally treat culture as the slow, unglamorous, irreducibly human work of building shared purpose it always proved to be.